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<title>i think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift) by StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26473432">i think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese'>StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Drowning, Introspection, POV of suicide, Sort Of, pov of death, pov of drowning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 08:00:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,866</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26473432</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Quynh, and her centuries spent in the iron maiden, waiting for rescue.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache of Scythia &amp; Quynh | Noriko</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>i think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Quynh woke abruptly.</p><p>Automatically, she started gasping for air but felt only water rush in instead. Ironic. Centuries of dying and waking, and she still couldn’t override the human instinct to gasp for breath, even as it doomed her.</p><p>The water filled her lungs, making her gag and choke and try to suck in more air.</p><p>But there was only water.</p><p>It stung, and pierced, and drowned her.</p><p>If she tried to open her eyes, she knew she would see only darkness, so she kept them squeezed shut even as her thoughts began to slow down.</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>After a while, it’s not the drowning that gets to her. It’s not the terrible and loathsome confinement. It’s not even the piercing, suffocating darkness.</p><p>It’s the cold.</p><p>It’s the awful, biting cold that simultaneously made her numb and burrowed under her skin like thousands upon thousands of needles. Sometimes, she dies of hypothermia before her lungs can fill.</p><p>Andromache would have died burning. Quynh dies, over and over, from the icy, merciless water.</p><p>Her hands and knees were bloody. Her lungs felt like they were on fire; a hilariously inappropriate metaphor.</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>She hadn’t slept in centuries.</p><p>It’s hard to sleep, when all you do is die.</p><p>But she still got the flashes.</p><p>Someone new– Sebastian– died, and came back to life, and probably died of shock right after that because he had been shot through the chest with a cannonball and there was no way waking up after a death like that wouldn’t cause some kind of trauma to his system. </p><p>The first time she dreamed, Quynh had thought, wildly, for half a second, that the whole nightmare of death and drowning was just that– a nightmare. </p><p>But then she woke up, and sucked in icy water, and died.</p><p>But still, a new ray of hope was extended to her.</p><p>Andromache. Yusuf. Nicolò. Sebastian.</p><p>
  <i>Remember them. Remember their names. They’re coming for you.</i>
</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>There was never enough time to starve, but she is hungry, so achingly hungry that it claws at her insides and tears her up.</p><p>To distract herself, she closed her eyes and remembered her friends. She remembered the real world, far, far away from the ocean and the saltwater that scraped her nasal cavity and throat and mouth bloody.</p><p>They were Andromache, Yusuf, Nicolò, Sebastian, and Quynh. A quintet. </p><p>That was who they were.</p><p>They were coming to her. Fighting their way to her.</p><p>It made sense. An immortal woman– a suspected witch, no less– trapped beneath the waves? It would make sense that there would be something guarding her body– some kind of standing army. And, of course, it would take a long time to actually find her body and get her out.</p><p>Andromache wouldn’t just forget her. Andromache was coming.</p><p>She was coming.</p><p>Quynh closed her eyes and slipped into Sebastian’s vision just as he dozed off.</p><p>And there she was.</p><p>Andromache. Smiling, happy, cheerful… relaxed.</p><p>Relaxed?</p><p>No. Surely she was just taking a break.</p><p>Right?</p><p>A break.</p><p>But suddenly, a tiny pinprick of doubt, that had been there since the very first dream, bloomed in her mind.</p><p>Andromache was looking for her.</p><p>Right?</p><p>Quynh looked around the room, suddenly panicked, desperately searching for something, anything, that would assuage her terror.</p><p>And there.</p><p>Behind Andromache’s smiling face. Beyond Nicolò’s laughing expression.</p><p>Diving equipment.</p><p>It was much, much more futuristic than anything she was used to, but Quynh knew it when she saw it. The helmet, the gloves, the full-body covering. It could be nothing else.</p><p>But the equipment was covered in dust.</p><p>Dust.</p><p>It hadn’t been touched in years.</p><p>Why?</p><p>Weren’t they searching for her?</p><p>Did they take a break to find Sebastian?</p><p>But he had already been with them for weeks. Why would they stay on break?</p><p>All of a sudden, the gnawing ache in her stomach took on an entirely different kind of pain.</p><p>No.</p><p>It couldn’t be true.</p><p>They were coming for her.</p><p>They just went out and bought new equipment, that was all.</p><p>And they kept the old suits, because… </p><p>Because… </p><p>They were coming. </p><p>They had to be.</p><p><i>Somebody</i> had to be looking for her.</p><p>Somebody had to be looking. Somebody. Anybody.</p><p>Quynh couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t stay here, trapped beneath the crushing weight of the ocean. </p><p>It would kill her. </p><p>Not just physically.</p><p>But the equipment was covered in dust.</p><p>The clothing was unfamiliar.</p><p>The weapons were unfamiliar.</p><p>Centuries had passed.</p><p>Centuries.</p><p>Andromache should have found her by now.</p><p>Somebody should have found her by now.</p><p>But nobody had.</p><p>They were laughing. </p><p>They weren’t anywhere near the ocean.</p><p>Quynh had made one fatal, fateful, error.</p><p>She had assumed that nothing would stop Andromache from looking for her.</p><p>She had believed that nothing, not years, not terrain, not the deepest of waters, could prevent Andromache from finding her and freeing her.</p><p>But they weren’t coming.</p><p>Andromache had stopped looking.</p><p>They were Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Booker.</p><p>No Quynh.</p><p>Quynh was gone.</p><p>Dead.</p><p>Dying.</p><p>Alone.</p><p>They had forgotten her.</p><p><i>Andromache</i> had forgotten her.</p><p>When Quynh opened her mouth to breathe, for once, it was purposeful. </p><p>Maybe this would be the last time.</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>There was another new one. It was hard to judge time, from her prison in the lightless, frigid box, but she knew it had been years.</p><p>Centuries, even.</p><p>She didn’t care.</p><p>From the day she realized that Andromache had left her behind, she had ceased pounding at her cell. She had stopped beating her knees and fists bloody.</p><p>She just lay there and waited to die.</p><p>Sometimes, she found herself slamming her body against the door, out of sheer habit. A habit that took centuries to build, and would probably take centuries to break.</p><p>Quynh was tired.</p><p>When she closed her eyes, images of Andromache and Yusuf and Nicolò and even Lykon danced across her eyelids, but this time, she knew they were nothing but fantasy.</p><p>Nobody was coming for her.</p><p>They were Andy, Joe, Nicky, Booker, and Nile.</p><p>There was no Quynh.</p><p>Maybe there never was. Maybe that's all they were, dreams.</p><p>Maybe Andromache was a dream.</p><p>Maybe Quynh had been underwater her whole life, dreaming of a world above.</p><p>Maybe she would never make it out.</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>When she’d first been trapped, Quynh had been terrified beyond all reasoning.</p><p>It was only after the initial panic and first few times she spent sucking in water instead of air, once she had reached a tentative monotony of death and the horrible agony of drowning, that she had remembered Andromache.</p><p>None of them had ever been burned alive before. Andromache was the eldest of them all, and she had had no mentor the way she had mentored Quynh, Lykon, Yusuf, and Nicolò. </p><p>She had been so afraid that Andromache had been reduced to nothing but ash, having died in the most horrific way possible. Worse, what if she <i>hadn’t</i> died, and was forced to go on as a pile of sentient dust? Could immortals heal from that?</p><p>Horrific visions had been swirling through her head, even as she died and came back and died and came back and died and came back, over and over and over again.</p><p>She hadn’t known Andromache was alive until Sebastian– <i>Booker</i>– had died.</p><p>When Booker’s dreams had begun and she had seen Andromache in them, she had felt a relief that she didn’t even know she was capable of feeling.</p><p>Andromache was alive. Andromache was not a pile of ash.</p><p>Andromache was okay.</p><p>But that begged the question of <i>why wasn’t she already here? Why hadn’t she come for Quynh? What had happened?</i></p><p>But Quynh couldn’t ask her. She couldn’t ask anyone.</p><p>She was alone.</p><p>She would never abandon Andromache.</p><p>
  <i>But Andromache abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>In the air, Andromache grew older, and breathed, and lived, and flourished.</p><p>Under the water, Quynh drowned, and died, and suffered, and bided her time.</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>Quynh automatically tried to breathe, grasping for air in the one environment where there was none. She hadn’t breathed air in centuries.</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>I would never abandon her.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>I’m going to make her pay.</i>
</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <i>Andromache.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>I’m coming for you, Andromache.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>If you’re even real.</i>
</p><p>Quynh was pounding at the door, working away at the lock, throwing herself at the door with all of her strength, in a way that she hadn’t done in years.</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me. She abandoned me. She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>Quynh screamed. She struck at the door, slammed her fists against it, pummelled it in a way that had become boring, routine, static, over the years and years and years of imprisonment.</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me. She abandoned me. She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>Quynh screamed, and died, and howled angry curses at the world, at the people who had put her here, and at Andromache, who hadn’t put her here but who had seen fit to <i>keep her here</i>.</p><p>When the lock popped open, Quynh had been so surprised she had actually frozen, unable to trust the sudden rush of newly cold water.</p><p>Was it true? </p><p>Was she free?</p><p>Slowly, Quynh realized that she was floating upwards.</p><p>Dimly, she made the realization that she had been incredibly, <i>incredibly</i>, lucky that her coffin had landed face-up, all those centuries ago. That tiny stroke of luck in a sea of unluckiness had finally, finally, allowed her to escape.</p><p>As she floated, Quynh curled up in a ball, just because she could.</p><p>For the first time in hundreds of years, she touched her knees to her chest, and she could have cried from joy.</p><p>And then she started swimming.</p><p>Her strokes were awkward and unsure, but slowly, she began to gain rhythm, all in tandem with her thoughts.</p><p>
  <i>She abandoned me. She abandoned me. She abandoned me.</i>
</p><p>Quynh could not count the amount of times she died, floating out there in the water, alternating between swimming and resting, but she knew that she had been swimming for a very long time, and she did not even know which way was up.</p><p>It was okay.</p><p>Quynh knew how to be patient.</p><p>The water around her was black. Quynh would not have been surprised if she had gone blind, after so many years in the dark, and she had almost accepted that reality when she saw it.</p><p>A tiny pinprick of light.</p><p>To anyone else, it would have been dim and faint and barely there.</p><p>But to Quynh, it was blinding.</p><p>She started swimming towards it, but oh, here was the pain that she knew all too well, here was the sharp ache in the lungs, the tedious spasms, everything coming together to create the monotonous routine of drowning.</p><p>And now the familiar darkness was encroaching, threatening, but not now, please no, not when she was so close, no, no no–</p><p>Quynh died.</p>
<hr/><p>When she woke, she was exhausted beyond belief. It was only her rage that fueled her arms and legs as she kicked and struggled her way towards that heavenly light, that spurred her towards the sunshine as the water got warmer and she left Death’s icy grip behind.</p><p>And Quynh broke the surface and <i>breathed</i>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>title is from the song "epilogue" by the antlers</p><p>Tell me what you thought? :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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